User Intent – Getting Results In The Now

So last night I was at the Prince concert at the 02 Arena in London, not my usual cup of tea, but worth the effort. And while I was queuing to get in I thought about how, when I had been searching online to find out what time he was on stage (8.45pm for those going, played till about 10.50pm) among other things the results for ‘Prince‘ were so much better from the Sponsored listings. That is, they were reflecting the need I had ‘in the now’ rather than the more generic search results from organic.

I guess the point of the ‘personalisation’ offering by Google is to have more relevant search results based on previous search history, both by the individual and perhpas by associated groups. But wouldn’t it make as much sense for results to reflect currrent events? This is not just about results from a ‘News’ vertical but about integrating currents events into organic searches.

Now this may already be going on to a degree and with ‘Universal Search’ this is what we would expect. But that information is coming from the various Google Verticals such as News, Blogs, Video and so on.

What I would like to see is the regular organic results (and related searches, but don’t get me started on those!) changing depending on current situation, be it localised such as UK based or event driven so a search for ‘Prince’ on Google UK reflects results for Prince the artist, and not Prince Software.

To be fair to Google the results were pretty good organically and I eventually got the information I wanted off a blog but it did get me thinking!

As a footnote I also noticed that there were two listing under two differant URLs for the same site: www.npgmusicclub.com and www.3121.com which is the offical site.

As for the concert? Pretty good, the venue was OK and not as bad acoustically as The Times made out, it was easy to get served at the bars and the loos were all clean! Getting to and from the arena was OK given there were 20,000 people attending, and Prince was on good form as well playing some old and mostly new tracks!